The Return of Frank Graben by Van Holt

Frank Graben rode into the remote mountain-walled basin looking for peace and quiet. Whitey Barlow, the cattle baron who had taken over the basin, told him to get out. The old tyrant sent one of his riders to warn everyone in the small isolate town of Hackamore to sell the stranger nothing and do no business of any kind with him. And he told Graben to stay out of Hackamore before he even got there.
The townspeople needed the big rancher’s business more than they needed the few dollars a hard-eyed gunfighter was likely to spend in their town before he drifted on. So they told Graben they didn’t want his kind in their town. But they didn’t know the kind of man Frank Graben was, and by the time they found out it was too late. He was shot from ambush and believed to be dead. But he got away and returned months later to get even.

WARNING: Reading a Van Holt western may make you want to get on a horse and hunt some bad guys down in the Old West. Of course, the easiest and most enjoyable way to do it is vicariously—by reading another Van Holt western.

Author Bio:
What some reviewers have to say about Van Holt’s writing:
“I had a feeling that Van Holt…might actually be the successor to Zane Gray, a master Western storysmith, whose novels set the style of a generation.” –Stern0
“Van Holt is King of the Spaghetti Western…” –Rarebird1

Van Holt wrote his first western when he was in high school and sent it to a literary agent, who soon returned it, saying it was too long but he would try to sell it if Holt would cut out 16,000 words. Young Holt couldn’t bear to cut out any of his perfect western, so he threw it away and started writing another one.
A draft notice interrupted his plans to become the next Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. A tour of duty as an MP stationed in South Korea was pretty much the usual MP stuff except for the time he nabbed a North Korean spy and had to talk the dimwitted desk sergeant out of letting the guy go. A briefcase stuffed with drawings of U.S. aircraft and the like only caused the overstuffed lifer behind the counter to rub his fat face, blink his bewildered eyes, and start eating a big candy bar to console himself. Imagine Van Holt’s surprise a few days later when he heard that same dumb sergeant telling a group of new admirers how he himself had caught the famous spy one day when he was on his way to the mess hall.
Holt says there hasn’t been too much excitement since he got out of the army, unless you count the time he was attacked by two mean young punks and shot one of them in the big toe. Holt believes what we need is punk control, not gun control.
After traveling all over the West and Southwest in an aging Pontiac, Van Holt got tired of traveling the day he rolled into Tucson and he has been there ever since, still dreaming of becoming the next Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour when he grows up. Or maybe the next great mystery writer. He likes to write mysteries when he’s not too busy writing westerns or eating Twinkies.

Warning: Reading a Van Holt western may make you want to get on a horse and hunt some bad guys down in the Old West. Of course, the easiest and most enjoyable way to do it is vicariously—by reading another Van Holt western.
Van Holt writes westerns the way they were meant to be written.